Tawa’ifs as travelling subjects

Since the publication of Oldenburg’s iconic essay in 1990,Footnote ¹ research on tawa’ifs has expanded significantly, and currently it is in its exciting interdisciplinary range. Scholars of tawa’if cultures have addressed the rich diversity and complexity of the hierarchical world of women performers, their repertoires of music, dance, and poetry, and their resistance as well as marginalisation across late colonial and postcolonial India.Footnote ² However ‘mobility’ is yet to be foregrounded, and this is what I set out to do in this article. Movement is embedded deep into the lives and identities of tawa’ifs right from the etymological origins of the Persian or Urdu word ţawā’if. Drawing on the Arabic ţawāf, which means ‘circumambulating the Grand Mosque in Mecca’, the term ţawā’if initially denoted diverse travelling groups of women performers who excelled in music and dance.Footnote ³ However, since circa 1800, the word ţawā’if began to accrue the cultural and literary status of a courtesan in Indo-Persianate courts of Delhi, Awadh, Hyderabad, and populous cities of North India.Footnote ⁴ Subsequently we know that tawa’ifs were not exclusively restricted to the late Mughal court; rather, they performed at melās (fairs),Footnote ⁵ in the koṭhās (salons)Footnote ⁶ at the bāzār, and by the early decades of the twentieth century for recording studios of gramophone companies.Footnote ⁷

As I reflect upon my own research journey, it is clear that my approach was clearly feminist in its methodology, although I did not articulate this in my doctoral thesis, merely referring to it as a ‘search’.Footnote ⁸ The possibility of writing a history of tawa’ifs was a personal attempt to try to learn how to ‘do’ history. Rethinking methodology and ‘sources’ was crucial, and I tried to excavate a range of textual sources such as manuscripts, lithographs, and printed materials of multiple genres—fiction, poetry, songbooks, music and dance treatises, travelogues, census reports, ethnographic notes, police records, newspaper reports. Reading these while analysing visual materials such as company paintings, postcards, photographic albums, and posters was necessary to piece together a history that had been touched upon by diverse scholars from ethnomusicology, dance studies, and prostitution but had not been in conversation with each other.Footnote ⁹ Writing multipronged histories of women performers was what I had set out to do, without realising how inherently feminist my approach was in the choice of a gendered subject and the need to find my own methodology. Consequently, my history became, to use Janaki Nair’s words, an ‘additive or contributory history’, an attempt to make women visible, ‘yet another group of women condemned to historical silence by archival absence’.Footnote ¹⁰ This attempt was in tune with contemporary work emerging on women performers in the late 1990s and early 2000s that accentuated the contribution of women in histories of poetry, music, and dance,Footnote ¹¹ as well as documented the struggles of women performers against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1868 that criminalised prostitution in colonial India; their heterogeneous performing identities ossifying into that of ‘dangerous outcasts’.Footnote ¹² Feminist in their approach, these histories focused on gendered subjectivity, forms of oppression, and the convoluted structures of patriarchy for which ‘rethinking methodology and archives’ was imperative.Footnote ¹³

In this article, I return to the archives to ask two specific questions. First, what did travel mean in the specific context of women performers? Using multiple but brief life histories of women performers, I will historicise distinctions in the types of mobilities these itinerant subjects engaged with. My second question is about how, and if, this approach challenges the extant historiography on women performers: a bigger and more fundamental question that ensues from this article. Does focusing on travel question our sense of periodisation, reveal something deeper about courtly patronage, or change our understanding of the relationship between musicians/performers, colonialism, and gender in any way? This article initiates a discussion around these questions but does not answer them yet. This is a call for foregrounding the travels of tawa’ifs which simultaneously acknowledges that this approach deconstructs tawa’ifs as a coherent group of ‘female travelling performers’. This conflicted approach is inherent to a feminist project, and as Janaki Nair has argued

Therefore, following Nair, this article will prise open the diverse nature of tawa’if travels, fully aware that tawa’ifs were a heterogeneous group of performers in North India and that more research into the caste and regional nuances of this group are yet to be understood. Equally, the article takes inspiration from Anjali Arondekar’s recent publication, Abundance (2023), a deeply personal, self-reflexive, and politically nuanced history of a devadasi collective, the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.Footnote ¹⁵ Arondekar writes a history of this caste-oppressed devadasi diaspora collective in Goa with its roots in Portuguese and British India in an attempt ‘to theorize a history of abundance’, ‘to upend genealogies of historical recuperation and representation’.Footnote ¹⁶

Unlike Arondekar’s work, research on tawa’if communities in North India is yet to move beyond the framework of courtesan traditions, and histories of music, dance, and prostitution. This article argues that travel can suggest a productive way forward. A combination of ethnographic and historical research into these tawa’if histories might reveal distinct caste, religious, and class identities in North India, in continuation of the work Amelia Macziewski and Anuja Agarwal have briefly attempted.Footnote ¹⁷ The evidence presented in this article also affirms Davesh Soneji’s formulation that women performers, in particular, inhabit ‘historical, social and aesthetic borderlands’.Footnote ¹⁸ However, my aim here is to connect their lives on these borderlands to wider circuits of travel, migration, and self-definition. I shall follow them as they take to the road, sometimes forced to seek refuge in towns for their love of music, sometimes performing in liminal spaces like railway platforms while competing with each other, and sometimes embarking on journeys that spanned continents in the dynamic yet complex world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. To begin this task, I shall address the multiple meanings of travel that this article hopes to address.

Multiple meanings of travel: circulation, mobility, and leisure travel

In their definitive study of circulation on the subcontinent, Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subhramanyam distinguish between mobility and circulation by positing that ‘circulation is different from simple mobility … as it implies a double movement of going forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely’.Footnote ¹⁹ They write that circulation is a value-loaded term which is incremental in aspect, as in the process of circulation, things, ‘men and notions often transform themselves’.Footnote ²⁰ And over a period of time, changes might occur in the ‘circulatory regime’ which can be understood as an ‘ensemble of crisscrossing circulating flows’.Footnote ²¹

Learning from this approach, here I trace the pathways, travels, and circulation of tawa’ifs as their mobilities get circumscribed and their livelihoods increasingly threatened from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s in colonial India. We shall move from the decline of Mughal supremacy in the eighteenth century to the emergence of the princely courts of Awadh, Banaras, Jaipur, and Hyderabad,Footnote ²² then onwards to the consequences of the 1857 Rebellion across North India and to turn-of-the-century Calcutta when gramophone companies began scouting for recording artists, and finally end with the 1930s and the emergence of the new technologies of broadcasting and cinema.Footnote ²³ This study will end in the 1930s due to the complications inherent in comparing the travels of tawa’ifs with women from non-performing backgrounds who began entering the musical public sphere more visibly in this decade, having learnt music and dance from gharana-based male teachers in the new reformist schools of music.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, by the 1930s, for tawa’ifs, the world had begun shrinking, but for performers like the middle-class and upper-caste Leila Roy or Lady Sokhey (1899–1947), who later came to be known as ‘Madame Menaka’, new opportunities were beginning to emerge.Footnote ²⁵ A comparative and nuanced analysis of these different groups of women performers and their travels could be a future project. For now, it is the genealogies of tawa’ifs that tell us more.

Courts, circuits of the slave trade, and histories of displacement

The slave trade, or the practice of buying and selling girls as slaves, was common to both the Mughal and Rajput courts, where female performers were often sent as gifts to forge political relationships.Footnote ²⁶ As early as the eighteenth century, existing records in Delhi reveal girls being sold and bought by various establishments. Sales deeds from late Mughal Delhi show that tawa’ifs themselves bought and received slave girls (kanīz) as gifts in their koṭhās.Footnote ²⁷ Apart from the local buyers such as nawabs, Europeans who led a lifestyle similar to the local elite (often termed nabobs)Footnote ²⁸ also bought these girls and then trained them to be part of their personal troupes. To be a patron of tawa’ifs was important for both nawabs and nabobs as a means to fashion their identities as patrons and connoisseurs of the arts. In other words, buying a tawa’if was a ‘means of social investment’.Footnote ²⁹

Famous nabobs such as Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (1741–1794) of Lucknow,Footnote ³⁰ David Ochterlony (1758–1825),Footnote ³¹ and James Skinner (1778–1841)Footnote ³² were patrons of tawa’ifs. Here is a glimpse of the type of close watch they kept on the musical training of these girls. In one of the many letters Polier wrote to his munshi, Lal Khan, he asked:

As a common practice, the slave trade pushed young girls to work as kanīz (slave girls), and those who could be trained in singing and dancing became part of performing troupes. Although the British Parliamentary Act had passed a legal rule in 1838 abolishing slavery in the British possessions, India was specifically excluded.Footnote ³⁴ The British had avoided intervening into slave trade practices in the zenanas or among the dancing girls.Footnote ³⁵ Girls were forced to traverse long distances and sold in fairs and markets across Awadh to parts of north-western India. Writing on his travels across Haridwar, the British East India Company lieutenant and artist Thomas Bacon (1813–1892) recorded:

The distances girls had travelled were long, the journeys traumatic, and any attempt to escape was suppressed. Referring to the dancing troupes as taffah, a distortion of the tawa’if, Captain Williamson noted in the East India Vade Mecum:

Young slaves and tawa’ifs often tried to escape from their owners but were forcibly brought back.Footnote ³⁸ Whether in service to a nabob or in the princely courts, several young girls who became tawa’ifs rarely had any agency and were caught in a tussle of ‘ownership’ and possession. A case history of Musummut Jummia, a kanchanī, who was kidnapped and then married over one year in 1823–1824 illustrates this well.Footnote ³⁹ Kanchanī, an Urdu term commonly used in eighteenth-century northern India, literally meant ‘the gilded one’ and referred in practice to women performers who sang and danced for male patrons.Footnote ⁴⁰

A performer with a troupe in Delhi, Musummut Jummia was passing through Karnal in Punjab to attend a marriage when she was abducted by one Ghulam Mohammed Khan, a retainer in the service of the Nawab of Kunjpura. The male owner of Jummia, called Iddo, filed a court case in Panipat to have his ‘purchased slave’ returned.Footnote ⁴¹ The British resident at Delhi sent the complaint to the nawab. However, since the retainer was one of the nawab’s favourites, the resident did not receive any response to his letter. After repeated reminders, the resident finally received a response that Jummia was ‘at first averse from remaining with the person who caused her to be carried off, but the marriage ceremony very naturally made her content’.Footnote ⁴² We can’t be sure if Jummia had any choice in getting married. More reminders to ‘return’ Jummia to her ‘owner’ fell on deaf ears. Eventually, the resident threatened to attach seven villages of Kunjpura to the company’s territory. The nawab’s lawyer argued that since Jummia was a married woman, following local customs she could not be asked to appear in person in the court. Instead, the nawab offered to pay Iddo a total of 1,050 rupees as compensation for his ‘loss’.Footnote ⁴³ Iddo refused to accept the offer. We cannot know what eventually happened as the case file ends here. In his report, the resident wrote that such cases often came up in his jurisdiction in Delhi. Sometimes performers chose to get married, while others tried to escape their owners and were forced to return. Precarity and displacement therefore marked the lives of tawa’ifs. From being sold as girls to being trained, from performing at weddings to settling down into married life, each journey was different.

Performing communities of kalāwañts, sarodiyās, sārañgiyās, tawa’ifs, bhagats, and kathaks and deredār tawa’ifs,Footnote ⁴⁴ skilled and talented in poetry, singing, and dance and in exclusive service to wealthy men have been known to be characteristically migrant communities as their livelihoods depended on courtly patronage. The lives of performers have always been dependent upon shifts in the political and cultural status of rulers, courtiers, and patrons, making Hindustani music largely feudal in its structure.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even though mobilities meant cross-pollination of music and dance repertoires, fostering the rich histories of performance in northern India, determining the agency or resistance of tawa’ifs is no easy task.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead, in the next section, we continue to loosen the hold of specific regional frameworks to understand how identity-making was crucially linked to mobilities. For instance, a search for the family roots of one of Hyderabad’s most famous tawa’ifs, also a poetess, Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañda’ (1767–1824), takes us to Deolia, Gujarat.

From displacement to upward mobility across generations

Born to Mida Bibi (later known as Raj Kanwar Bai) and Bahadur Khan ‘Turki’, a soldier in the Nizam’s army, Chanda grew up with an elder step-sister who entered the harem of Muhammad Yar Khan Ruknud-Daulah, or the pillar of the state, in Hyderabad in 1765. Chanda received her training from famous ustads in music and poetry, and acquired courtly skills of horse-riding and archery. Her first public performance as a tawa’if was at the age of 15 at the Nizam of Hyderabad’s court, and she soon attracted the patronage of Mir Alam (1752–1808), Aristu Jah (1732–1804), and Raja Chandu Lal (1761–1845). All three of these men held the position of divan, or prime minister, at the courts of Nawab Asaf Jah II (r. 1762–1803) and Nawab Asaf Jah III (r. 1803–1829) at Hyderabad. Chanda was honoured with the royal title, ‘Māh Laqā Bā’ī’, the ‘Moon-Faced One’ in 1803 by Asaf Jah III.Footnote ⁴⁷ As I have shown elsewhere in detail, her transformation into a tawa’if was shaped by previous generations of women learning the arts of music and dance.Footnote ⁴⁸

Chanda was named after her grandmother Chanda Bibi of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Her grandfather, Khwaja Hussain, was a Mughal administrator who, when accused of embezzlement from the royal treasury, abandoned the entire family to escape arrest. Chanda Bibi, his wife, was put under house arrest with her three daughters and two sons. Left with no source of income, Chanda Bibi had no choice but to escape the city. Undertaking an arduous journey through several villages and towns, the family took refuge in the town of Deolia, Gujarat, with a troupe of bhagats (male performers and storytellers) who trained her daughters in music and dance.Footnote ⁴⁹ One of her daughters, Mida Bibi, entered the harem of Nawab Salim Singh as a wife, and soon a daughter was born to the couple. However, conflict among the women in the harem pushed Mida Bibi to leave Deolia. Yet again the three sisters had to find a way to escape, and they took the young girl, Mehtab, and travelled towards Burhanpur in Central India in 1747. During the journey, Chanda Bibi passed away. Nothing much is known about the fate of her sons. Her daughters changed their names: Mida Bibi became Raj Kanwar Bai, and the other two took on the names Brij Kanwar Bai and Polan Kanwar Bai, respectively, while the girl Mehtab became Mehtab Kanwar Bai. Moving towards Aurangabad, the sisters and the niece established themselves as popular performers among the armies of Nawab Asaf Jah II, who shifted his capital to Hyderabad in 1762. A few years later, Raj Kanwar Bai gave birth to two daughters, one among them born to Bahadur Khan ‘Turki’, a soldier in the nizam’s army, was named Chanda after the grandmother. Meanwhile Mehtab Kanwar Bai had become a concubine of a wealthy nawab, Muhammad Yar Khan, and Chanda grew up in a wealthy home where she got opportunities to learn music, dance, horse-riding, archery, and languages such as Persian and Urdu.Footnote ⁵⁰

Chanda’s transformation into the famous Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañda’ was therefore possible because her mother and aunts moved from Aurangabad to Hyderabad just as the city was being established as the capital of the Nizamat. Patronage of courtesans or tawa’ifs in eighteenth-century princely states was a means for rulers and wealthy landholders to demonstrate their status as connoisseurs. Chanda’s success and upward social mobility was possible in the first instance due to her upbringing, her training, and her deft use of her talents in poetry, horse-riding, music, and dance, as well as her acute knowledge of political affairs and diplomacy. Equally, however, she could only succeed in this way on account of the autonomous travels undertaken by her mother and aunts. Discerning agency is a difficult and complex task fraught with challenges of evidence and the dangers of simplification. Chanda’s subsequent status and wealth must be connected with the struggles of generations of tawa’ifs and the history of displacement and migration across regions and towns.

Although mobilities in search of patronage have been an inherent aspect of performer’s lives, evident in feudal societies such as eighteenth-century Hyderabad, Awadh, or Delhi, displaced women and young girls were either sold to performing troupes or autonomously chose to acquire training in music and dance as a means of finding opportunities for livelihoods. The same was documented by the famous journalist Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) in his now well-known chronicle of courtly Lucknow. Sharar was born after the 1857 Rebellion and wrote his chronicle on Awadh, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Documenting the shift of Awadh’s capital in 1775, he traced the migration of performers in search of employment as Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah (r. 1775–1797) shifted the court from Faizabad to Lucknow, the new capital of Awadh.Footnote ⁵¹

Histories of migration and displacement also mean production of new forms of cultural practices. Be it in the efflorescent forms of music such as thumri, kathak dance, or rekhti poetry in Urdu, the role of tawa’ifs was significant.Footnote ⁵² As generations of widows, and enslaved girls and women in search of livelihoods joined the community of tawa’ifs, they acquired training in music and dance for professional mobility.Footnote ⁵³ By the late nineteenth century, names of cities and towns became increasingly visible as suffixes to the names and titles of tawa’ifs, while simultaneously gharana (household establishment) became a common term to address musical households headed by kalawants, demonstrating the deep connections between places, travel, and identity-making.Footnote ⁵⁴

Male gharanas, migration, and regions as markers of identity

The ‘scattering’ of musicians and artists from the late Mughal court of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748) and the centrality of guild-like musical households to identities of artists especially in the emerging princely states of Hyderabad, Jaipur, and Awadh is by now well documented.Footnote ⁵⁵ Tracing the connections between communities of musicians and military labour from Lucknow, Braj, and Rohilkhand, Adrian McNeil has shown that the communities of dādhis (instrumentalists who played ḍhāḍha or ḍholak) and tawa’ifs were connected and most likely ‘many women belonged to the same families and fraternities (birādarīs) as their accompanists, and were forced to work as tawa’if in Lucknow by the desperation of their circumstances’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This movement of performing communities from Delhi, Braj, Bundelkhand, Rohilkhand, Ujjain, and Rewa to LucknowFootnote ⁵⁷ was to be followed by yet another wave of displacement and search for livelihood after the 1857 Rebellion.

While the eighteenth-century history of the family of Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañda’ was one of mobilities and generational continuity, it is a historiography based on piecing together bits of scattered historical evidence that requires rethinking our approach to tawa’if cultures as linked to specific courts or towns. But by the late nineteenth century, archival records assert residential units of music called gharana or koṭhā with names of performers, making it easier to discern them in the historical evidence. Consequently, women performers appear more frequently with place names associated with their identities, thus marking their movement more clearly.

The gharana is a household establishment in which the father or ustad—a male musician or singer—is the most crucial, and it is this identity as artists that is expressed through possession of musical knowledge passed down at least three generations of a musical family.Footnote ⁵⁸In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, wealthier courts such as Awadh, Jaipur, and Hyderabad became epicentres of cultural patronage, and the tawa’ifs’ journeys to these courts (as well as others such as Rampur and Lahore) are marked by an interesting change.Footnote ⁵⁹

By the late nineteenth century, anti-nautch movements had begun to transform the cultural world of musicians and dancers, and kalāwañts began to disassociate themselves from tawa’ifs to shape their own independent musical careers. The high competition among performers in search of patronage meant that ta’līm (training) and ‘ilm (knowledge) were essential to display as significant markers of identities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Kalāwañts also distanced themselves from ḍhaḍhīs,Footnote ⁶¹ qawwāls (singers at Sufi shrines who sang khayāl and tappā), and sārañgiyās (teachers or instrumental accompanists to women performers).Footnote ⁶² In order to be active in circuits of musical production, place names became a way for the tawa’ifs to distinguish themselves from each other and to trace their musical apprenticeship to specific musical households, or gharanas.

For instance, a nineteenth-century treatise on music mentions that Khajoor Bai and Hirabai of Deccan, Sharafoo Bai, the daughter of Seedhu Bai of Lucknow, Bandijan of Umrao, and Khursheed Bai of Agra were active.Footnote ⁶³ Often tawa’ifs’ choice of popular names such as ‘Bandijan’, ‘Khursheed’, ‘Khajoor’, or ‘Chanda’ makes it very difficult for the historian today to trace female genealogies; putting together a life history of Mah Laqa Bai is a rare success based on reading biographies. We know that throughout the late nineteenth century tawa’ifs secured employment in the courts of Rewa, Bundelkhand, Rampur, Alwar, Bithour, and Nepal, and moved from one court to another whenever they found better salaries and prospects.Footnote ⁶⁴ To reiterate, movement was inherent to tawa’ifs as performers, and travel was a necessity, a condition of their lives not necessarily of their own choosing. Tracing this movement becomes easier after the 1857 Rebellion because the regional identities of kalāwañts, gharanas, and tawa’ifs emerged strongly. The use of place names as markers of identity was a crucial aspect of self-fashioning both for the kalāwañts and for the tawa’ifs.

In the post-1857 milieu, when tawa’ifs were being victimised by the colonial state, the Anti-Nautch movement campaigners, social reformers, and male kalāwañts increasingly foregrounded their lineage tracing them to gharanas.Footnote ⁶⁵ For tawa’ifs to retain their identity as performers and distinguish themselves from low-ranked prostitutes, hereditary status became an essential means to assert and to shape collective identities. To make musical training visible, women would now choose names such as ‘Malka Jan’, ‘Umrao Jan’, ‘Zohra Bai’, or ‘Chanda Bai’, which mean queen, noble, beautiful, or moon, while publicly displaying their links to musical lineages as shāgirds (disciples) of male ustads and their gharanas associated with a town or a city.Footnote ⁶⁶

For instance, the case of Malka Jan ‘Banaraswali’ (1857?–1906)—who was born Adeline Victoria Hemming to an English father, Hardy Hemmings, and his Indian bībī (concubine) Rukmani—and her journey from Azamgarh to Banaras and then Calcutta is now well known.Footnote ⁶⁷ Adeline was called Malka Jan ‘Banāraswālī’ because she acquired her musical training in Banaras; as a Eurasian born of a mixed race she was also known as Memsahib Tawa’if ‘Banārsī’. Publicising her training in Banaras was important to establish her identity as a performer of talent and to distinguish herself from her contemporaries, such as Malka Jan of Agra.Footnote ⁶⁸ On the publication of her songbook, Diwān-e-Malkā Jān (1886), 11 tawa’ifs congratulated her.Footnote ⁶⁹ These included Bibi Manjhu Sahiba Tawa’if Mushtari of Lucknow of the Zohra-Mushtari sisters, Bibi Moti Jan Sahiba of Hyderabad, and others from Calcutta, Bareilly, Darbhanga, and Moradabad.Footnote ⁷⁰ Sometimes tawa’ifs also used two places as suffixes in their names, for example, Bibi Khurshid Jan Tawa’if Dehalvi from Calcutta. Delhi was the place where she earned her musical education, but she was now settled in Calcutta.Footnote ⁷¹

Names like Malka Jan, Zohra Bai, and others were commonly used to build on the nostalgia and symbolism of a lost culture and stake a claim to courtly training linked to the musical heritage threatened by the anti-nautch propaganda. Further, emphasising regional identities through the convention of attaching place names was a way to create new markers of identity and assert lineage within erstwhile systems of musical knowledge to counter the emerging forms of musical training and pedagogy being promoted in the national music conferences and ‘modern’ music schools.Footnote ⁷² Schools such as Gandharva Mahavidyalaya of Lahore or Marris College of Lucknow would forbid tawa’ifs to teach or learn in these modern institutions of music pedagogy.Footnote ⁷³ While mobilities were always a facet of tawa’if lives, these place markers became acts of self-fashioning and identity-making in the rapidly changing context of the late nineteenth century when musical and dance cultures were being reshaped beyond the traditional settings of court and koṭhās to the institutions such as music schools. The tawa’ifs were negotiating their status through the circulation of their songs in printed songbooks, even as babus (clerks) in colonial offices were popularising their own taz̄kiras (compilations) that included short biographical notes and poetic compositions of the tawa’ifs.Footnote ⁷⁴ Beyond the immediate circle of patrons, tawa’ifs’ musical repertoires as well as their images were gaining wider circulation in the form of cheaply available postcards, cartes de visite, cigarette cards, and even matchboxes, as a form of advertisement.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the late nineteenth century, place names were important because the tawa’ifs were mediating new circuits of consumption and circulation, and songbooks and visual representations popularised them and their repertoires across regions; however, this also transformed some of them into commodities to be put on display in transnational circuits of exploitation. Not all tawa’ifs could assert status or agency; many were displayed as exhibits in Europe and America for an audience completely unfamiliar with tawa’if cultures.

Transnational nautches and colonial displays: circuits of commodities

Displays of native craftsmen and arts from colonies were a common feature of exhibitions held in Europe and America by the 1880s. Indigenous peoples brought from colonies were put up in unplanned ‘displays’ for shows across the empire. These histories of dehumanising and treating the colonial subjects as objects and curiosities at exhibitions alerts us to the complex and hierarchical relationship between women performers and the empire. Saloni Mathur documents how two nautch women, a mother and daughter, were put up on display among 42 craftsmen at a show held by Liberty’s Store in London.Footnote ⁷⁶ Some visitors even touched them, with the excuse that they thought these women were also on sale, while others openly stared at them. The whole event was a huge failure as severe criticism of the exhibition emerged in Indian newspapers and a fund was subsequently created for the men and women to be sent back home. However, the lack of food and proper facilities led to the death of one.Footnote ⁷⁷ This was not a case in isolation and not only specific to London; in America, nautch girls gave their first performance in 1881.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even though their show received poor reviews, Priya Srinivasan shows how this failure of the nautches was attributed to the Indian dancers with reporters noting that ‘Indian women dancers left audiences disillusioned’, and they were not the ‘oriental dancing girls’ of their dreams.Footnote ⁷⁹

In the next few decades, even more dancers from India arrived in America and performed on the streets, in circuses, dime museums, and sideshows, but not on opera or theatre stages. However, after 1907 nautch dancers completely disappeared from the American stage.Footnote ⁸⁰ Till then the displays of nautch girls in circuses and dime museums were part of exploitative circulatory regimes of human curiosities in which people from the colonies were made into exotic exhibits for the visual entertainment of European and American peoples.

Exemplifying these themes is a case file from 1899. This details the tragic journey of Bhar Singh, a Jat Sikh from the village Talwandi in Ferozepur district, Punjab who travelled to the Straits Settlements and then all across Europe with his wife in search of employment, only to be left stranded with no support. Working under a Chinese man for a year, Bhar Singh had left Talwandi for Deli, Sumatra, to join his brother who ran a business there. After saving up some money while working, Bhar Singh returned to Singapore and set up his trade in milk and married Bachhini. Unfortunately, their buffaloes died, but during this period of financial hardship Bhar Singh met one Mr J. S. Fairlie, from Charing Cross, London, who was the manager of a circus group.Footnote ⁸¹ Fairlie offered to give both the husband and wife employment and a regular salary. Bhar Singh became a watchman for the troupe and Bacchini was asked to dress up as a Punjabi woman for an exhibit on life in Indian villages. This exhibit also included dance performances, for which Fairlie hired one Sinhalese woman, and three nautch girls from Madras. He went on to hire 18 people in this troupe; 11 men, five women, and two children.

Bhar Singh was to be paid 40 dollars a month, 20 dollars each for him and for his wife. The troupe set sail for Europe with the proprietor and the manager and reached Germany in the month of May. For the next three months, the troupe was given food but never got paid in full. They landed in Trieste and then moved to different cities such as Vienna, Hamburg, Kiel, Bremen, and Magdeburg. Their last payment was to be made in Hamburg on 6 September 1899, but when the troupe asked for arrears, there was a row between the manager and the proprietor. The proprietor had paid their four months’ salary, which was deposited with Fairlie. Following the dispute over money, Fairlie absconded without paying anyone. The troupe were stranded in Germany and had no support. They were sent as destitutes to the ‘Home for Asiatics’ in Limehouse, East London, by the British Consul, and around 11 December five members of the troupe were repatriated as they wished. But Bhar Singh, Bacchini, the two nautch girls and their husbands and children could not be sent back. We do not know what happened to Bhar Singh and Bacchini, but the nautch girls and their families remained in England for a month and were unable to find any employment. They were therefore forced to sell some of their clothes and travelled to Paris with some assistance and the remainder of their belongings in ten packages. Unable to find ways to sustain themselves, they again got in touch with the British Consul. Since they did not speak French, they had to take some help from one Victor Nadhar, who was a fellow native and a valet in Paris. Victor tried to translate their requests into an application. He also spent a whole day trying to get the performers some form of engagement in the Parisian music halls, but their performances were ‘not considered to be sufficiently attractive’.Footnote ⁸²

The officer at the British Consul made further requests to the under secretary of state about four natives of India who were destitute in the city. The performers reported that they needed support and wanted to go to Marseilles, where they hoped to get free passage on board a British ship leaving for India. The consul officer tried to offer them passages to London through the British charitable fund so that they could be sent to the Home for Asiatics, but the group refused. The consul then offered them board and lodging at the rate of about 5 pounds per head per day. The officer requested more funds from the secretary of state, but since the secretary of state refused to give any financial support, the case was closed, and we do not know what happened to them. This case is one of the many examples of how men and women often migrated from colonies to Europe in search of livelihoods. These could include women performers who ended up being displayed as curiosities. Many amongst them were left destitute, while others undertook long journeys home with little or no money or food. These transnational travels show that as circuits of consumption and journeys widened from the late nineteenth century, it did not lead to social amelioration; rather it added to the risk of vulnerability of performers and forced many into lives of extreme penury, displacement, and sometimes even death.

Hence, by the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Indian local scenes were part of the larger translocal dance scene, and each cluster shared many elements, across national boundaries, with the others.’Footnote ⁸³ While tawa’ifs, devadasis, and nautch girls became targets of moral condemnation by missionaries and social reformers involved with anti-nautch movements across India,Footnote ⁸⁴ in Europe and America these encounters inspired some women to take up careers as professional dancers on the international stage. The history of white women like Ruth St Denis or upper caste women like Madame Menaka taking up careers in music and dance against the marginalisation of tawa’ifs and devadasis is intricately connected to the changing discourses of ‘classical’ dance, the role of art critics, the establishment of music and dance schools, and the success of anti-nautch movements in the early decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁵ Though exploring this aspect currently lies beyond the scope of this article, we do know that cross-cultural interactions of women performers were hierarchical in terms of racial locations, colonial politics of gaze, and the objectification of their bodies. Turned into commodities of transnational trade, tawa’ifs were colonial subjects as well as symbols of lost heritage. For most tawa’ifs, travel in search of sustenance was exploitative and exhausting, but for those who were trained and belonged to the second or third generation of performers, shaping their identities into those of gānewālīs, or singers, especially as recording artists, offered new opportunities.

Recording artists on trains: voices that travel

Perceived as a threat by proponents of anti-nautch movements and social reformers, some tawa’ifs reinvented themselves as singers and recording artists for gramophone companies such as the Gramophone and Typewriter Limited (GTL), which had sent their officials on ‘expeditions’ to find new markets in the colonies in the early decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1902, when F. W. Gaisberg of the GTL arrived in Calcutta to scout for singers to record, Gauhar Jan was already a celebrity tawa’if who charged 300 rupees for an evening performance and ‘often drove at sundown on the Maidan in a fine carriage’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tawa’ifs sang for recording companies and appeared in advertisements and promotional materials of the GTL.Footnote ⁸⁸ Michael S. Kinnear, Suresh Chandavankar, and Amlan Dasgupta have documented the immense role played by tawa’if singers in shaping this new soundscape of modernity in early twentieth-century India.Footnote ⁸⁹ A ‘modern aura’ of Hindustani music developed in the gramophone age when new ways of listening emerged.Footnote ⁹⁰ Tawa’ifs’ songs entered middle-class domestic households, and the records were labelled as ‘amateur’ recordings, which meant that the tawa’if repertoires were now available for listeners outside the erstwhile spaces of koṭhās and the royal courts.Footnote ⁹¹

From the 1920s to 1930s, radio would further alter the soundscape, and the establishment of All India Radio (AIR) in 1936 would shape a ‘national audience’.Footnote ⁹² Broadcasting would therefore become a central aspect of the ‘narratives of nation-building through infrastructural consolidations, a standardised sense of clock time (especially leisure time), and linguistic and affective communities’.Footnote ⁹³ Although extremely exciting, connecting the performances by tawa’ifs at All India Radio stations and its relationship with ‘sonic modernity’ currently lies beyond the scope of this article.Footnote ⁹⁴

Instead, we go back to the gānewālīs or tawa’ifs who either took to the road in their cars or travelled by railway (passenger trains had begun running in 1853) to go to performances. Large distances could be covered faster. However, did faster modes of travel enable performers to lead broader, faster-moving lives? Following a single life history of a tawa’if in detail might be a possible option to map this journey, but more crucially did the mode of travel suggest a different set of opportunities or upward mobility? The answer to this question is complex and is best illustrated by the following incident.

In his interviews with elderly tawa’ifs in the 1950s, one of Amritlal Nagar’s aging interviewees recalled an incident that took place in Bareilly decades ago.Footnote ⁹⁵ Tawa’ifs Kamleshwari and Durgesh from Banaras, and Shamim and Allah Rakhi from Fatehpur had all arrived to sing at a gathering (maḩfil) in the city. Allah Rakhi Bai had planned to stay for just a day as she had performed in Lucknow a day earlier. She was to travel to Kannauj for another performance the following day. At Bareilly, each tawa’if tried to outshine the others at the musical gathering. In the evening, a bullock cart had been arranged to take Kamleshwari to the railway station. Meanwhile as Allah Rakhi was more popular among the music aficionados, they urged her to sing and stay a little longer. As she prepared to leave, they arranged a car for her to reach the station. On the way, she met Kamleshwari and offered to give her a ride. Kamleshwari refused and said, ‘tumhāre naşīb meñ moṭar, hamāre naşīb meñ bailgāṛī’ [It’s your good fortune, you have a car, in my luck, I have a bullock cart].Footnote ⁹⁶

The car was an improved means of transport, for some such as Allah Rakhi it emphasised their wealth and social status, but for others such as Kamleshwari it reaffirmed the providential divide.Footnote ⁹⁷ An improved means of transport did not necessarily create new opportunities for all tawa’ifs. If Janaki Bai (1880–1934) of Allahabad travelled in her Gotham car,Footnote ⁹⁸ it was more a marker of status and a practice common to courtesans of high status.Footnote ⁹⁹ Along with cars, rail was another means of travel between cities and towns, but it seems that this did not change much in the lives of performers. Future research can more seriously take up David A. Turner’s call to embed gender and performance within histories of mobility and transport,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and perhaps it can also reveal the way performers inhabit, transform, and sometimes produce new spaces of performance beyond the commonly known court, salon, or stage, such as the railway platform in the following case.

In his journalistic documentation on the lives of performers, Nagar recorded an interesting incident on the journey made by tawa’ifs Jamilan of Kanpur and Shamim Bano of Lucknow. Both were on their way back from a maḩfil in Kanpur and had arrived early at the railway station. To the great amusement of bystanders, they soon ended up having an argument. Each accused the other of trying to outshine the other and contested the number of followers they had. To settle the matter, the tawa’ifs decided upon an impromptu dañgal (musical competition; also the word for a wrestling bout) on the railway platform. The waiting passengers had a great time and enjoyed the free performance; we do not know who won or how the performers fared during the journey, but the platform had become a stage for a day.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Hence, distinct modes of travel offered tawa’ifs a means to move between cities and towns but that does not necessarily alter our understanding of how patronage networks changed. We, however, might be able to identify some aspects of their travel experience.Footnote ¹⁰² Did any family members travel with them, or was it only fellow musicians? Did they have choices of places to stay en route? Where did they find accommodation? In a rare memoir of an early twentieth-century tawa’if singer that is discussed in the next section, we get a few answers to these questions, along with a glimpse into the life of a tawa’if and her desire to travel and see the world at her leisure. A desire that unfortunately was not fulfilled.

Travel for work, leisure, and companionship

Malka Pukhraj (1912–2004) was employed by Maharaja Hari Singh (r. 1926–1952) of Jammu and Kashmir as a court performer in the month of February 1926, the year of his coronation. Her first visit to the royal court was when the maharaja’s secretary, Abdul Qaiyyum Khan, arrived in a car to take her to the court. The maharaja was impressed by her performance, and she was awarded 1,000 rupees and a dress, with an offer of employment at 650 rupees per month and the rank of ‘gazetted officer’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Malka would have to spend six months in Jammu and six months in Kashmir. Subsequently, she would travel with her accompanists in the car sent by the princely court, while their luggage would be sent by bus.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As a tawa’if, her daily routine was extremely hectic. In Jammu, Malka started her day at 4 am, travelling to the temple in Mandi where she sang bhajans (devotional songs). Then she would leave for the palace in Ram Nagar, stay there, perform in the evenings, often after a meal, and leave by 11 pm.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ She had to prepare even harder for important events such as the royal coronation of Hari Singh held in 1926, to which rulers from other princely states were also invited. Performers from these princely states came along with their royal patrons in special trains, and Malka described the elaborate preparations made for their arrival. About two months prior to the coronation ceremony in Jammu:

Although Malka travelled often for performances, she once expressed her desire to see Lahore. After a series of requests, the maharaja agreed and took her along. He used to play polo there, and Malka travelled aboard a special train from Jammu to Lahore. She hoped to do some window-shopping, buy things, and have a good time. She recalled:

Unfortunately, the maharaja fell into a bad mood when his shoes could not be found, and he refused to go out into the city; poor Malka returned having seen nothing. Her desire to travel without family, in her own clothes, and not a uniform or as part of any retinue, clearly shows the restricted life of a tawa’if. As a performer and employee of the court, she had to be available at all times. If and when she travelled, she was accompanied by family members, ustads, and musicians. The tawa’ifs had always taken to the road, travelled in search for work, performed across cities and towns, and were part of circuits of entertainment; however, their own desire for travel as a mode of leisure and sightseeing may not have been so easily fulfilled. Mobility was inherent to the lifestyle of the tawa’ifs, yet discerning the different journeys they undertook either for patronage or as a consequence of displacement or leisure can offer us insights into histories of travel, transport, gender, and performance.

Conclusion: travelling female performers and mobility

A major consequence of the 1857 Rebellion was migration, with larger numbers of young girls sold into slavery in its wake. Yet at the same time, evidence shows that many tawa’ifs continued to migrate autonomously in search of patronage. Using cars or trains was as much a convenience as a display of public status, wealth, and fame. While the modes and conditions of travelling tawai’fs were indeed reshaped by colonialism, the particular routes they followed drew upon pre-existing and established trajectories of travel, performance, and networks of patronage. Under colonialism, the extent of disruption and displacement experienced by tawa’if communities seems to have transformed these earlier migration patterns to new princely courts, in terms of the numbers of people travelling, the scale at which they travelled (transnational circuits), and possibly the speed with which they travelled.

As this article has shown, the journeys undertaken by women performers were dependent on patronage and interconnected with slave trade networks that had existed prior to the early decades of the nineteenth century. Modes of transport changed, but the experiences shaped by hierarchies of class or status among tawa’ifs did not seem to alter much. For some, like Janaki Bai, car journeys became markers of success and wealth; while to others, such as the young Malka Pukhraj, it was yet another vehicle owned by her employer to transport performers like her from one venue to another. For Kamleshwari, the car was a marker of destiny itself, rather than a vehicle for displaying talent or agency. For others, however, their journeys within transnational circuits of display left them destitute and in precarious conditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The moral censure and loss of status of tawa’ifs, which began in the late nineteenth century, sped up shifts in the musical and cultural soundscapes that became fully evident by the 1930s. Adapting to these changes, tawa’ifs continued to carve their own distinctive careers as singers and recording artists, tailoring their repertoires to new consumers of songbooks and gramophone recordings. A feminist historiography addressing the travel and mobilities of tawa’ifs therefore challenges a historiography based on traditional periodisation assumptions that see colonisation as marking radical changes in their lives as moving subjects who transform and adapt although precarity remains an aspect of their lives.

Tawa’if histories therefore lie at the intersection of the slave trade, patronage, and erasure, when often women chose to leave their personal identities hidden from their public persona as performers. From migration to displacement to circulation of young girls as slaves, and transmission of musical genres and dance forms, the lives of female travelling performers were constantly in flux, and it is this change that is often difficult to map, as women chose to erase their pasts and take on new professional identities. Piecing these life histories together in this article is a feminist endeavour that has undertaken its own journey beyond established models of historiography and archival research. Overall, this article has tried to initiate the process of unmooring the histories of tawa’ifs from their usual locations in histories of specific cities, regions, and princely states, by making travel its central focus. Decentering the dependence on the princely courts of Awadh and Delhi, future research could follow their diaspora (a process that has already begun with Arondekar’s recent work),Footnote ¹⁰⁹ leading to new histories of performing communities that lie at the intersections of communication, caste, and sexuality studies.